I'll say one thing for this rotten, bastard election*. It's made me love the internet at last. My problems with the internet – which I conceive of as a magic cloud-brain – are manifold. First of all, I am (and I don't say this approvingly) a natural late adopter. Didn't get legwarmers until 1991. Didn't have sex till I was, in Catford schoolgirl years, 106. Still haven't seen Deadwood, let alone The Wire. And the internet – well, it's just, you know... so big. Even for a magic cloud-brain, I feel, it is big. I prefer things whose edges I can see. And if I can't actually see them, I would at least like to be able to envisage them. This is not possible with necromantic fog.

Second, it functions as a constant reminder of how infinitesimally little I know, or will ever know. I have conniptions enough when I watch one of those programmes stuffed with experts that reveal another hidden world of knowledge around every corner. Last week's History Cold Case on BBC2, for example, had to examine the skeleton of a medieval African man discovered when an old Franciscan priory was redeveloped. It fielded a "stable isotopes expert", a facial reconstruction expert, an authority on medieval herbal medicine, another on early black history in England and a man who could glance at the 300m documents held in the National Archives and put his hand on the one that identified four Saracens brought back by the companion of the priory's founder. They calmly disgorged this wealth of knowledge, pieced together his story and then continued on their ways. Multiply by a kazillion the boggling feelings of envy and inadequacy thus induced, and there you have the internet.

Then there are the people you meet on it. My first real introduction to the interactive nature of the web was when the Guardian launched Comment is free. I thought, naively, that the comments would be wholly concentrated on articles that talked about politics'n'that, the stuff that traditionally divides opinion and stimulates debate. I, on the other hand, think of myself as, in essence, the paper's capering monkey, turning somersaults in a little waistcoat and possibly a pillbox hat for your entertainment, offering the chance either to laugh or – um – not. It was a shock to find so many people like to club idiot monkeys – I'd be more of a "shaking the sorrowful head and moving quietly on" type myself – and repeated exposure has only allowed me to resign myself, rather than warm to the experience.

But then came the discovery of Twitter. And, as Margaret Atwood (or @MargaretAtwood) says, it is like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. Or a 17th-century coffee house. Or even just a 21st-century Starbucks, but filled with people you'd actually like to meet instead of desperate mothers trying to refuel themselves for another 12-hour stint with multiple hyperstimulated toddlers. I couldn't have got through the election without it. When the agony or frustration becomes too much to bear, you can just pop out a little cry for help and a thousand cries of sympathy and support – and some invigorating jokes – come rushing back. Before you know it, you really do feel like part of a – dread word that is coming to lose its loathsomeness for me – community.

So, thank you, Twitter, and, by extension, Mr Internet. Thank you for your help and your humour. Let us step towards the foul future together and deal with it, one small, 140-character step at a time.

* I'm writing the day after polling day, when it is not yet clear who is to govern the country, but it is nevertheless abundantly obvious that the country contains enough people who can look at the turd-brained, sputum-coloured, platitude-spewing, expenses-wringing grotesque that is David Cameron and think, "You know what? Let's give him a go!" and therefore probably deserves to go to hell in a handwoven Oka (owned by his mother-in-law, Lady Annabel Astor) handbasket.